Madam Speaker, I aspire to one day have such a capability of presenting ideas and notions in the House as the hon. member now has.
I am going to speak in English so my question is really clear.
The member made a comment about the Prime Minister acting as ship without a rudder. I would suggest that perhaps it is a ship that is not paying taxes. It may be one of the reasons why he feels at this time that it was so opportune for him to be able to dismiss any pay increase, a notion that for many of the people in my riding of Skeena—Bulkley Valley would be absolutely obscene, but I suppose when one is a multi-millionaire several times over in the avoidance of taxes one is able to make such suggestions and is able to hold to it.
Now that we have reopened this can of worms, as it were, and are now preparing to look at another way of compensating members of Parliament due to this lack of leadership, I am wondering if we could consider this. The House is meant to represent and defend many of the issues the member raised in terms of poverty among children, student loans and student debt loads. I am wondering if we would not consider tying our salaries to an index related to those issues.
If Parliament is functioning and doing well on something like health care or child poverty, then we should be compensated equally as well if we are doing our job. Many in the private sector have looked to such a system in order to compensate their managers and upper managers; when the company does well, they too do well. In this House, regardless of what poor legislation gets passed year after year, the salaries continue to rise, while for people in Canada the wage gap continues to grow and people become poorer.
Would there not be another index available to us, one that ties the members in the House to the quality of life experienced by Canadians, particularly lower and middle income Canadians? We can measure our society by how we treat these people. I am wondering if the House might eventually consider such original and diverse thinking as this.